The Miracle of Doing Impossible Things
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I did it! I submitted the examen doctoral, my PhD program’s comprehensive exam. I wrote and wrote for 80 pages about research on museums and experience and innovation and storytelling and interdisciplinary collaboration and money and imagination, and how digital fits into all of that.
This was something that felt impossible. It’s been the next step in my PhD path for years now, but a job then a baby then a pandemic kept pushing it back, until this summer was the time to do it or get off the boat. All of a sudden, the thing I had been worried about for years, the thing I was secretly afraid that I was not capable of doing, was the thing I had to actually do. I had to write actual sentences. There was no more hiding.
And I was flooded with the same feeling that washed over me about an hour into active labor: there was no way I could possibly keep going, but there was no other way through. And like in labor, as I wrestled with my doctoral exam, I was met by something bigger than myself, or rather, something bigger in myself. My careful preparations of building support systems and laying down foundations for the process, my utter and unrelenting presence to the effort of the work, were sustained by what honestly feels in the register of miraculous.
Yes, the miracle of it. The miracle of facing that which feels impossible and being met there. Even there!
I submitted a satisfyingly voluminous document to my program this week, and I’ve been in a state of awe ever since. I’ve felt the need to go sit by quiet things: a lake, a forest, a river. I’m on the other side. And in strangely similar timing as after my son was born, I’m already forgetting the acuteness of the labor pains. I’m admiring this new creation.
And I can imagine diving back in for more.
These photos were taken in some of my favorite galleries in the Musée du Louvre, filled with Ancient Greek terracotta and ceramic statuettes (Sully wing, first floor, galleries 35-38).
